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The Wall Street Journal is running a fascinating article about new research that claims that brains who are growing up without a dad show short- and long-term changes in nerve cell growth. The initial research results, indicate that father-less children show “more aggressive and impulsive behavior.”
The findings were based on research focused on degus, small rodents related to guinea pigs and chinchillas at the Otto von Guericke University in Magdeburg, Germany. The study was presented at the Society for Neuroscience meeting in Chicago earlier this month and recently published in the journal Neuroscience.
I have no idea how closely the behavior of degus in fact relates to human behavior, but the research of biologist Anna Katharina Braun and her group is certainly interesting. What may be surprising is that the interactions between the pups and the mother did not change that much in single parent and two-parent scenarios. However, that also means that single parent pups received much less care than those that grew up under the care of both parents.
As a result, the single parent rodents had less dense dendritic spines in their early life, but were able to catch up later on. However, Braun also found that “the length of some types of dendrites was significantly shorter in some parts of the brain, even in adulthood, in fatherless animals.“
So, what does that mean: “A preliminary analysis of the degus’ behavior showed that fatherless animals seemed to have a lack of impulse control […] when they played with siblings, they engaged in more play-fighting or aggressive behavior”, WSJ author Shirley Wang writes.
While it is an obvious question how closely those research results relate to humans, it seems to be a natural conclusion that children need attention. Wang quotes Braun: “The bottom line is that parents need to fuel their children’s brains with talk, touch and sensitive stimulation that involves give and take. Parents are the sculptors of their children’s brains.”
Read the entire article here. Thank you to Shirley for the post.
This news, if it in fact applies to human single parents and their child, may not be so exciting, but it seems to shed some light on a possible fact. But being aware of this research may one more reason for divorced parents to closely work together in raising their children.
